I’m lying on a mattress thinking about how Laurence does this with his left, slower, his thumb doing that circle at the base.
I’m soft. Getting softer.
The lad looks up, confused.
‘You alright, mate?’
His voice is higher than I’d clocked at the party. Twenty-year-old earnest. He is trying.
‘Yeah.’ I sit up, back against a wall that smells of cigarettes absorbed over months. ‘Yeah, mate, sorry.’
‘Is it me?’
No, it is profoundly not him.
It’s the knowledge I have, which has not asked my permission to be mine, that the grip I want is left-handed and slower and belongs to a thirty-one-year-old across the city.
It’s that my body has signed a contract without consulting me on the terms.
I make an excuse and leave. The tram back from Rusholme takes eleven minutes, and I spend all eleven thinking about Laurence’s hands, hating myself for the comparison, hating myself more that it isn’t even close.
The category of strangers in rooms and bathrooms has closed. I didn’t vote. It’s closed the way a shop closes when it has nothing left on the shelves. Someone’s turned the light off, flipped the sign, and the boy who lived off that shop’s stock is in the street in the rain with coins in his pocket and nowhere useful to spend them.
Sunday, I let myself into his flat at seven, and he’s in the kitchen, and I’m on him before the key’s out of the lock, and when he says ‘I missed you’ and stops himself, the words hang there, unfinished.
We both know what it was.
The problem set is week eight’s—applied analysis, convergence proofs, epsilon-delta arguments. Laurence distributes it on Tuesday, and I finish it on the tram, done before my stop. I hand it in on Wednesday with the others and don’t think about it.
Thursday, his flat, afterwards, on his sheets under his ceiling with sweat cooling on my ribs and his hand resting on my stomach in that way I still haven’t learned to hold still for.
‘That solution you turned in.’
I turn my head. He’s on his back, eyes on the ceiling, but his voice has shifted register—something closer to the lecture theatre.
‘The epsilon-delta argument in question three. You didn’t use the standard approach.’
‘The standard approach is longer.’
‘The standard approach is what I taught.’
‘Yours works. Mine’s faster.’
He turns his head, eyes doing the thing they do when reading a proof that surprises him—recognition before impressed.
‘Where did you learn to think like that?’
I shrug, the sheets shift. ‘Nowhere. It’s just how it works.’
‘It’s not how it works for most people.’ The hand on my stomach doesn’t move, but the pressure shifts. Heavier. Like he’s holding me in place for what comes next. ‘You could do extraordinary things with that mind, Ewan. You know that?’
The register is teacher, not lover, and I have nowhere to put the words.
Nobody’s said this to me. No teacher, no Ronan, no Mum, no admissions tutor who processed my clearing application like it was a parking ticket.
Deflect. Make a joke.
‘Cheers.’ It comes out flat—just cheers.
